


Things That You Believe

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hell Trauma, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:47:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25625413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Happiness is for other peopleand other lies your brain told you.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Lucifer & Sam Winchester
Comments: 7
Kudos: 74





	Things That You Believe

1\. It's all your fault. 

Sam came back from the Pit different. Sam came back wrong, with a few parts lopped off. Sam’s body walked around on its own for about 547 days, doing whatever it wanted. (It apparently wanted a lot of sex, a lot of hunting, a working relationship with long-dead family members he has never met, a lot of blood on its hands.)

Sam’s in his body now. He still doesn’t know what he did—not everything; no one will tell him—but he can read the general shape of it in the looks people give him. The small twitch of Bobby’s shoulders (away, always away) whenever he gets too near, the shadow under Dean’s eyes.

They’re gentle about it. Polite. Everybody’s so goddamn _nice._

“It wasn’t you,” Dean keeps saying. “Sammy, it wasn’t you.” Like there are two of him, the guilty and the innocent—the imposter that came around to steal everyone’s peace of mind then left without a trace, a thief in the night—and him, blameless and innocent.

They were his hands, though. It was his gun, his body, his voice. It was his brain driving the bus, no one else’s. If you take one hunter and subtract a soul, you still have one hunter.

How can it be someone else’s fault when there’s only one of him?

2\. It's never going to get any better. 

He’d thought, when he came back—he’d thought not knowing was the worst of it. He had gotten a little paranoid, started looking too closely at anyone who glanced at him even the slightest bit off. He thought maybe he’d done something to them, that they were someone he’d hurt. They were the mother, daughter, husband, uncle, sister of someone he’d killed. Someone who was never coming back, never coming to dinner, thank you, Sam Winchester.

He’d thought that was the worst it could possibly get.

He was wrong again.

It turns out it can get a lot worse. It can, and it does. The first hell seizure is a love tap compared to the unholy flood of shit that comes tearing loose when Cas breaks down the wall.

He’s got all the greatest, worst hits blaring in his head 24/7. People he shot, people he killed. All the chunks Lucifer took out of his hide, all the words whispered in the dark, and he knows Dean thinks that he knows. They’re both ex-cons released from the Pit, so of course it makes sense that they could find comfort in each other. But he can’t—

There are so many things Dean doesn’t know, so many things Sam can’t (can _never)_ tell him. If it was all good, clean torture—all screams and knives, meathooks and whips—then sure. Maybe Sam would let on a little something. But it’s not and it isn’t and it could never be. There are so many things Sam needs Dean to never find out—that he asked for it. That he _begged,_ sometimes he begged until his throat grew bloody and raw and his voice ran out. Sometimes he turned toward any comfort he could find in the dark, the unrelenting dark, let himself be wrapped in grotesque wings.

The thing is, Sam _asked_ for it, again and again. Oh, sure, sometimes he screamed for it to stop. He said _no_ and _please_ and _stop please please stop,_ like the best of them. There were times when he would have given anything to have those hands (knives, hooks, whatever) off his body. The knowledge should make it better. Somehow it only makes it worse—that knowing how bad it was, that knowing how bad it could really get, he still asked for it, over and over and over.

So this—this is where he lives now. He doesn’t expect it to get any better. It’s kind of a relief.

3\. Beer can pass as comfort in a pinch.

Sam’s never been a big drinker. Oh, he drinks. It’d be damn near impossible not to in their line of work, but he’s rarely found the kind of oblivion he wants at the bottom of a bottle. He’s tried his best, of course. After Dean got dragged to hell by a pack of mean bitches, he’d tried for _weeks._ He was fall down, blind drunk until Ruby took the bottle out of his hand and replaced it with something in the key of copper.

So yeah, he drinks.

He drinks these days—drinks when he opens his mouth to speak, after Bobby’s caught him yelling at the blank wall again, after he presses a cold bottle into Sam’s bum hand. He drinks with the prickling feeling of the devil’s eyes on his back, when Lucifer is standing so close—so _close—_ that Sam can feel Lucifer’s breath stirring on the back of his neck, raising the fine hairs there and making him sick.

Dean still looks at him like he’s made of glass, like there’s something (several somethings) he’s not telling Sam.

_How’re you doing, Sam?_

God, everyone keeps asking. How are you how are you how are you how are you—

Fine. Fine, fine, fine. Everything’s fine, scrambled eggs, sunny-side up fine.

He smiles like broken glass. He takes up meditation, but he can only breathe when he’s in motion, so he runs. He does drink.

4\. Happiness is for other people.

He is, though. He’s fine, for a certain value of _fine._ He can make it through the days. He can stand up and fight, win some, lose some. He can avoid drawing his pistol and pointing it right between Lucifer’s eyes when that motherfucker’s taunting, always _taunting—_

Look, he knows there’s no one there. (Mostly. Mostly, he knows.)

He chews his way through the inside of his cheek, rips open the stitches on his hand again and again and _again._ He knows. It’s fine.

This isn’t even the second, third, fourth, fifth worst thing that’s ever happened to him.

5\. He'd be better off without you.

He should just leave. He knows it, can see it every time he looks at Dean’s face, grim and set in hard, harsh lines. Dean used to be the happy one, out of the two of them. Which, you know, wasn’t saying much, but it was something. Dean’s never sober these days.

He should leave. He _should._ Leave and let Dean get back to having a life—to making a life; he did it once before, after all. He can do it again—a life that isn’t chasing after his cracked-walnut fuck-up of a baby brother.

Dean could find—maybe not Lisa, not now, not after all of this (fucking _stupid,_ Dean), but someone. Someone nice.

Or maybe he’s fooling himself (definitely is). Maybe Dean will never give up the life again—never could, not really, not unless Sam made him—but he could do a lot better than having to look after Sam every second of every single day.

He should go. He would, if he weren’t so goddamn selfish. Always, always fucking selfish. He just can’t bring himself to do it.

“You know the answer,” Lucifer says. “You do, don’t you?” Eyes in the dark, the devil riding behind him in the back of the Impala, arms slinked around the back of the driver’s seat, his face right next to Sam’s.

Sam doesn’t talk to him anymore. That’s one of the rules he has. He doesn’t talk to things that aren’t there.

Lucifer pouts about it. “Still with the silent treatment, Sam?” He clucks his tongue. “I’m hurt.”

 _Fuck you,_ Sam thinks. He tightens his jaw, grits his teeth. He slants his eyes over to Dean snoring in the seat beside him, a beaten silver flask clutched loosely in his hand.

Lucifer sighs and sinks back in his seat. “Alright, alright.” Hands spread in a gesture that looks not a damn thing like surrender. “You win. But don’t worry, I can talk enough for the both of us.”

 _Fuck you,_ Sam thinks. _Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you._

He white-knuckles the steering wheel and drives.

**Author's Note:**

> Still on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


End file.
